Archive for October, 2006

Three hundred million

Thursday, October 26th, 2006

The United States recently passed the 300 million people mark for population. I didn’t really think much of it last week.
A few minutes ago a thought struck me with great force:
Suppose some crazy, ridiculous, clearly nutjob idea was believed by only 0.01% of the United States population.  That’s thirty thousand people.  The same percentage of the […]

Books and the Sony Reader

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

I love reading. I read a lot. I’ve been reading about the new Sony Reader. 
The device I want has to have paper-like readability in any light I can read a paper book in now.  I don’t want to worry about battery life. Cell phones have reached this milestone – I rarely think about my cell phone’s […]

Party like it’s 1999

Tuesday, October 10th, 2006

Quick! Buy some companies before it’s too late!  After all, paying lots of money for eyeballs is a strategy by itself.
It’ll be interesting to see how this new boom plays out. I particularly like the noise about how the YouTube purchase puts pressure on other companies to quickly make a “response.”

arrrooooooooooooo

Friday, October 6th, 2006

The full moon will appear nearly 12% bigger than usual tonight because it is near perigee.   I noticed the moon last night and it seemed huge and it is thus interesting to learn that it does indeed appear bigger than normal rather than the usual illusionary bigness from being near the horizon.

Single-Click VNC

Monday, October 2nd, 2006

Hooray, somebody finally cloned the parts of Copilot I wanted so I can use this technology to help family members without either paying for Copilot myself (not going to happen) or asking them to pay (happened a couple times but always felt kind of overpriced).
Lifehacker’s post UltraVNC Singleclick describes how to use it.  It’s a version of the VNC […]

Power usage

Sunday, October 1st, 2006

In normal operation my PC plus monitors uses between 180 and 320 watts. It’s much more variable than I expected. The monitors by themselves account for a fairly stable 70 watts (30 watts for the 18.1″ Sony and 40 watts for the 20″ Dell). When “off” the monitors use 0.5 watts (more or less, that’s near […]

EV rally

Sunday, October 1st, 2006

I dropped by the The Silicon Valley EAA Rally this past Saturday. It had a mix of homebrew and manufactured cars including the Tesla Roadster. There were some people driving around the parking lot (the “rally” part of the event) but for me the interesting bit was seeing all the cars.
Sadly, the experience didn’t do much […]